oneself, that there are times when it is desirable to be seen and times
when it is felicitous to vanish.
But Strawinsky, Lucifer of the season, brightest in the firmament,
took the call many times, small and correctly neat in pince-nez. His advent
was well prepared by Mr. Eugene Goossens—also rather conspicuous this
year—who conducted two Sacre du Printemps concerts, and other Strawin-
sky concerts were given before his arrival.4 The music was certainly too
new and strange to please very many people; it is true that on the first
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night it was received with wild applause, and it is to be regretted that only
three performances were given. If the ballet was not perfect, the fault does
not lie either in the music, or in the choreography—which was admirable,
or in the dancing—where Madame Sokolova distinguished herself. To
me the music seemed very remarkable—but at all events struck me as
possessing a quality of modernity which I missed from the ballet which
accompanied it. The e¤ect was like Ulysses with illustrations by the best
contemporary illustrator.
Strawinsky, that is to say, had done his job in the music. But music
that is to be taken like operatic music, music accompanying and explained
by an action, must have a drama which has been put through the same
process of development as the music itself. The spirit of the music was
modern, and the spirit of the ballet was primitive ceremony. The Vegetation
Rite upon which the ballet is founded remained, in spite of the music, a
pageant of primitive culture. It was interesting to any one who had read
The Golden Bough and similar works, but hardly more than interesting.5
In art there should be interpenetration and metamorphosis. Even The
Golden Bough can be read in two ways: as a collection of entertaining
myths, or as a revelation of that vanished mind of which our mind is a
continuation. In everything in the Sacre du Printemps, except in the music, one missed the sense of the present. Whether Strawinsky’s music be permanent or ephemeral I do not know; but it did seem to transform the
rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of ma-
chinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the
underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to
transform these despairing noises into music.
Mr. Bernard Shaw
It is not within my province to discuss Back to Methuselah, but the appear-
ance of the book may make some observations on Mr. Shaw not imperti-
nent, and it is an advantage for my purpose that the book is as well known
in America as it is here.6 A valedictory tone in this book (already noticed
by Mr. Seldes) is not inapposite to a successful season of his plays by Mr.
Macdermott’s company.7 Blanco Posnet is now running at the Court Theatre.8
The recognition indicated by this success implies perhaps that Mr. Shaw
has attained, in the most eulogistic sense of his own term, the position
of an Ancient.9
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e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e
Seven years ago, in 1914, when Mr. Shaw came out with his thoughts
about the War, the situation was very di¤erent.10 It might have been pre-
dicted that what he said then would not seem subversive or blasphemous
now. The public has accepted Mr. Shaw, not by recognizing the intelligence
of what he said then, but by forgetting it; but we must not forget that at
one time Mr. Shaw was a very unpopular man. He is no longer the gadfly
of the commonwealth; but even if he has never been appreciated, it is
something that he should be respected. To-day he is perhaps an important
elder man of letters in a sense in which Mr. Hardy is not. Hardy represents
to us a still earlier generation not by his date of birth but by his type of
mind.11 He is of the day before yesterday, whilst Shaw is of a to-day that
is only this evening. Hardy is Victorian, Shaw is Edwardian. Shaw is there-
fore more interesting to us, for by reflecting on his mind we may form
some plausible conjecture about the mind of the next age—about what,
in retrospect, the “present” generation will be found to have been. Shaw
belongs to a fluid world, he is an insular Diderot, but more serious.12 I
should say—for it is amusing, if unsafe, to prophesy—that we shall de-
mand from our next leaders a purer intellect, more scientific, more logical,
more rigorous. Shaw’s mind is a free and easy mind: every idea, no matter
how irrelevant, is welcome. Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, the “Pref-
ace” to Methuselah would have seemed a cogent synthesis of thought in-
stead of a delightful farrago of Mr. Shaw’s conversation about economics,
politics, biology, dramatic and art criticism. It is not merely that Mr. Shaw
is wilful; it is also that he lacks the interest in, and capacity for, continuous
reasoning.
Mr. Shaw has never cajoled the public; it is no fault of his that he has
been taken for a joker, a cleverer Oscar Wilde, when his intention was al-
ways austerely serious.13 It is his seriousness which has made him un-
popular, which made Oscar Wilde appear, in comparison, dull enough to
be a safe and respectable playwright. But Shaw has perhaps su¤ered in a
more vital way from the public denseness; a more appreciative audience
might have prevented him from being satisfied with an epigram instead
of a demonstration. On the other hand Mr. Shaw himself has hardly under-
stood his own seriousness, or known where it might lead him: he is some-
how amazingly innocent. The explanation is that Mr. Shaw never was
really interested in life. Had he been more curious about the actual and
abiding human being, he might have been less clever and less surprising.
l o n d o n l e t t e r , s e p t e m b e r 19 2 1
1 9 1
He was interested in the comparatively transient things, in anything that
can or should be changed; but he was not interested in, was rather im-
patient of, the things which always have been and always will be the same.
Now the fact which makes Methuselah impressive is that the nature of the
subject, the attempt to expose a panorama of human history “as far as
thought can reach,” almost compels Mr. Shaw to face ultimate questions.14
His creative evolution proceeds so far that the process ceases to be progress,
and progress ceases to have any meaning. Even the author appears to be
conscious of the question whether the beginning and the end are not the
same, and whether, as Mr. Bradley says, “whatever you know, it is all one.”15
(Certainly the way of life of the younger generation, in his glimpse of life
in the most remote future, is unpleasantly like a Raymond Duncan or
Margaret-Morris school of dancing in the present.)16
There is evidence that Mr. Shaw has many thoughts by the way; as a
rule he welcomes them and seldom dismisses them as irrelevant. The
pessimism of the conclusion of his last book is a thought which he has
neither welcomed nor dismissed; and it is pessimism only because he
has not realized that at the end he has only approached a beginning, that
his end is only the starting point towards the knowledge of life.
The book may for a moment be taken as the last word of a century,
perhaps of two centuries. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were
the ages of logical science: not in the sense that this science actually made
more progress than the others, but in the sense that it was biology that
influenced the imagination of non-scientific people. Darwin is the repre-
sentative of those years, as Newton of the seventeenth, and Einstein perhaps
of ours. Creative evolution is a phrase that has lost both its stimulant and
sedative virtues. It is possible that an exasperated generation may find
comfort in admiring, even if without understanding, mathematics, may
suspect that precision and profundity are not incompatible, may find ma-
turity as interesting as adolescence, and permanence more interesting
than change. It must at all events be either much more demoralized intel-
lectually than the last age, or very much more disciplined.
t h e m e t a p h y s i c a l p o e t s 1
b y c o l l e c t i n g t h e s e p o e m s from the work of a generation more often named than read, and more often read than profitably studied, Professor Grierson has rendered a service of some importance.2 Certainly the
reader will meet with many poems already preserved in other antholo-
gies, at the same time that he discovers poems such as those of Aurelian
Townshend or Lord Herbert of Cherbury here included.3 But the function
of such an anthology as this is neither that of Professor Saintsbury’s ad-
mirable edition of Caroline poets nor that of the Oxford Book of English
Verse. 4 Mr. Grierson’s book is in itself a piece of criticism, and a provocation of criticism; and we think that he was right in including so many
poems of Donne, elsewhere (though not in many editions) accessible, as
documents in the case of “metaphysical poetry.” The phrase has long done
duty as a term of abuse, or as the label of a quaint and pleasant taste. The
question is to what extent the so-called metaphysicals formed a school (in
our own times we should say a “movement”), and how far this so-called
school or movement is a digression from the main current.
Not only is it extremely diªcult to define metaphysical poetry, but
diªcult to decide what poets practise it and in which of their verses. The
poetry of Donne (to whom Marvell and Bishop King are sometimes nearer
than any of the other authors) is late Elizabethan, its feeling often very
close to that of Chapman.5 The “courtly” poetry is derivative from Jonson,
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t h e m e t a p h y s i c a l p o e t s
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who borrowed liberally from the Latin; it expires in the next century with
the sentiment and witticism of Prior.6 There is finally the devotional verse
of Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw (echoed long after by Christina Rossetti
and Francis Thompson);7 Crashaw, sometimes more profound and less
sectarian than the others, has a quality which returns through the Eliza-
bethan period to the early Italians. It is diªcult to find any precise use of
metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is common to all the poets and
at the same time important enough as an element of style to isolate these
poets as a group. Donne, and often Cowley, employ a device which is some-
times considered characteristically “metaphysical”: the elaboration (con-
trasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the farthest stage
to which ingenuity can carry it.8 Thus Cowley develops the commonplace
comparison of the world to a chess-board through long stanzas (“To Des-
tiny”), and Donne, with more grace, in “A Valediction,” the comparison
of two lovers to a pair of compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the
mere explication of the content of a comparison, a development by rapid
association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of
the reader.
On a round ball
A workeman that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,
So doth each teare
Which thee doth weare,
A globe, yea world by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.9
Here we find at least two connexions which are not implicit in the first
figure, but are forced upon it by the poet: from the geographer’s globe to
the tear, and the tear to the deluge. On the other hand, some of Donne’s
most successful and characteristic e¤ects are secured by brief words and
sudden contrasts:
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,10
where the most powerful e¤ect is produced by the sudden contrast of as-
sociations of “bright hair” and of “bone.” This telescoping of images and
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e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e
multiplied association is characteristic of the phrase of some of the drama-
tists of the period which Donne knew: not to mention Shakespeare, it is
frequent in Middleton, Webster, and Tourneur, and is one of the sources
of the vitality of their language.11
Johnson, who employed the term “metaphysical poets,” apparently
having Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley chiefly in mind, remarks of them
that “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”12 The
force of this impeachment lies in the failure of the conjunction, the fact
that often the ideas are yoked but not united; and if we are to judge of
styles of poetry by their abuse, enough examples may be found in Cleve-
land to justify Johnson’s condemnation.13 But a degree of heterogeneity
of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet’s mind is
omnipresent in poetry. We need not select for illustration such a line as:
Notre âme est un trois-mâts cherchant son Icarie;14
we may find it in some of the best lines of Johnson himself (“The Vanity
of Human Wishes”):
A petty fortress, and a dubious hand;
He left a name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral, or adorn a tale,15
where the e¤ect is due to a contrast of ideas, di¤erent in degree but the
same in principle, as that which Johnson mildly reprehended. And in one
of the finest poems of the age (a poem which could not have been written
in any other age), the “Exequy” of Bishop King, the extended comparison
is used with perfect success; the idea and the simile become one, in the
passage in which the Bishop illustrates his impatience to see his dead
wife, under the figure of a journey:
Stay for me there; I will not faile
To meet thee in that hollow Vale.
And think not much of my delay;
I am already on the way,
And follow thee with all the speed
Desire can make, or sorrows breed.
Each minute is a short degree,
t h e m e t a p h y s i c a l p o e t s
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And ev’ry houre a step towards thee.
At night when I betake to rest,
Next morn I rise nearer my West
Of life, almost by eight houres sail,
Than when sleep breath’d his drowsy gale . . .
But heark! My Pulse, like a soft Drum
Beats my approach, tells Thee I come;
And slow howere my marches be,
I shall at last sit down by Thee. 16
(In the last few lines there is that e¤ect of terror which is several times
attained by one of Bishop King’s admirers, Edgar Poe.)17 Again, we may
justly take these quatrains from Lord Herbert’s “Ode,” stanzas which
would, we think, be immediately pronounced to be of the metaphysical
school:
So when from hence we shall be gone,
And be no more, nor you, nor I,
As one another’s mystery,
Each shall be both, yet both but one.
This said, in her up-lifted face,
Her eyes, which did that beauty crown,
Were like two starrs, that having faln down,
Look up again to find their place:
While such a moveless silent peace
Did seize on their becalmed sense,
One would have thought some influence
Their ravished spirits did possess.18
There is nothing in these lines (with the possible exception of the
stars, a simile not at once grasped, but lovely and justified) which fits John-
son’s general observations on the metaphysical poets in his essay on Cow-
ley. A good deal resides in the richness of association which is at the same
time borrowed from and given to the world “becalmed”; but the meaning
is clear, the language simple and elegant. It is to be observed that the lan-
guage of these poets is as a rule simple and pure; in the verse of George
Herbert this simplicity is carried as far as it can go—a simplicity emu-
lated without success by numerous modern poets. The structure of the
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e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e
sentences, on the other hand, is sometimes far from simple, but this is
not a vice; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling. The e¤ect, at its best, is
far less artificial than that of an ode by Gray.19 And as this fidelity induces
variety of thought and feeling, so it induces variety of music. We doubt
whether, in the eighteenth century, could be found two poems in nominally
the same metre, so dissimilar as Marvell’s “Coy Mistress” and Crashaw’s